RESIDENTS of Mariupol used to regard themselves as immune to the turmoil enveloping southern Ukraine after they saw off pro-Russian separatists eight years ago.
“We Mariupol people thought we’d smelled the gunpowder in 2014 and seen a lot,” said Ivan Goltvenko, director of personnel and administration at the city’s Metinvest-owned Azovstal steel plant. “But guess what—we were wrong.”
Now, their city lies in ruins, civilians are buried in make-shift graves, and Mariupol has become a symbol of the devastation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war with his neighbor.
Goltvenko is one of those lucky to have escaped.
The 38-year-old had never thought of leaving the port city of more than 400,000 on the Sea of Azov. His father and grandfather had worked for Azovstal, and he nurtured a dream that his two sons would follow, too. He enjoyed the city with its vibrant culture, mild climate and proximity to the sea.
Nearly three weeks after Russia launched its invasion, Goltvenko spoke by video link from Vinnytsia, a city 720 kilometers from Mariupol, to which he was able to flee this week. The story of his escape was verified by Metinvest, his employer.
On the second day of war, Goltvenko insisted that his wife leave the city with their sons, and he moved into his parents’ apartment on the city’s main thoroughfare, Prospekt Myru, or “Peace Avenue.” The street would be heavily bombed in the days that followed.
The apartment overlooked a lawn where his sons liked to play in summertime. Opposite stood a hospital and maternity ward that would become synonymous with the indiscriminate shelling of residential areas carried out by Russian forces, a charge that Russia continues to deny.
“This is how this place looks like today,” Goltvenko says, showing a photo of a building with empty, charred windows.
Other pictures show a destroyed building that was once the university where he studied and met his wife, a pizza place they used to frequent in normal times, and a jewelery shop where he planned to buy his wife a present for International Women’s Day, March 8. It’s now a charred skeleton of bent steel and broken glass.
“It’s like seeing a loved one dying in your arms and one vital organ after another failing,” he said.
It’s not like Mariupol was unprepared for war. After 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fanned separatist insurgencies in the industrialized regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Metinvest meticulously overhauled the company’s bomb shelters, filling them with medical supplies, food and water, and organizing communications. As many as 8,500 people could hole up there—workers and their families.
As head of personnel, Goltvenko’s job was to help the company’s staff. But the bunkers were only ever intended to help people shelter from bombings, not for a prolonged siege. As it became clear that Mariupol was being surrounded, more and more Azovstal employees, especially those from nearby towns being overrun by Russian troops, requested to locate their families in the shelters.
Goltvenko said that his position allowed him some insight into the defense of the city, and insists there were no Ukrainian troops positioned downtown, let alone in the maternity ward as Russia later claimed.
Instead, he said the shelling deliberately targeted locations where people gathered for evacuation—the hospital, the university, the theater—along the most obvious route leading west from Mariupol toward government-held safe areas in central Ukraine.
In 2014, Mariupol sustained multiple rocket attacks. Now, it’s the aircraft assaults that residents fear the most.
“However thick your walls are, you hear the roar of the airplane which descends to attack, you feel this vibration, the whistle of the missile fired,” he said. “It lasts for 4-5 seconds which seem an eternity, after which there comes an explosion.”
Everything begins to shake, and all you can do is wonder where the next missile will hit, he said.
After about a week, a first attempt at establishing an evacuation corridor for civilians collapsed. With mobile links down, only the most daring climbed onto rooftops to catch a signal and spread the news. Even the mere mention of a corridor was “like a ray of light to us,” Goltvenko said.
Toward the end of the second week, he realized that he and his parents would either starve to death, die of thirst, or perish from bombs. Taking to the road was no guarantee of survival, but at least it offered a chance.
On the way out of the city by car along a designated humanitarian corridor, they witnessed two apartment blocks being bombed in front on them. “So it became clear this was a one-way road,” he said.
The 250 kilometers or so from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia, normally a couple of hours’ drive, took them two days. They moved in a convoy of about 100 vehicles, groping their way forward as it quickly became obvious that Russian forces weren’t observing the cease-fire.
The convoy spent several hours at a Russian checkpoint trying in vain to persuade the soldiers to let them pass. It was one of several encounters with Russian troops, some of whom were simply looking for food, vodka or cigarettes. Others were frightened young conscripts, lightly dressed, who warmed themselves at fires by the roadside and said they knew nothing of humanitarian corridors.
They spent a night in a nearby village. There was no electricity or gas, but the stoves were warm and the people welcoming. One of them showed a way to bypass the checkpoint. Next morning, they drove over fields and on dirt roads, keeping about 15 meters between each car in case of explosives. On reaching the highway, they found harrowing scenes of corpses and a truck full of dead soldiers. They knew they had to keep moving.
Eventually, they reached a town where they were stopped by men in sportswear, waving Kalashnikov automatic guns at them. Only yellow bands wrapped around their hands gave away that they were “territorial defense units,” militia organized by Ukraine to protect civilian areas.
They explained that it was best to wait as there was a tank battle underway nearby. When they signaled it was safe, the convoy moved off at top speed. The road was destroyed, asphalt dust hung thick in the air. The drivers focused on the red tail lights ahead while also glancing in the rear mirror at the headlights behind, and that way moved in unison, like links in a chain.
About 400 people were able to get out of Mariupol in the convoy with Goltvenko, four to each car. He called his friend in Mariupol and described the route, telling him to break into a room in the steel plant’s administrative office where alcohol was stored and use it to bribe Russian soldiers. It worked, and his friend managed to lead another 23 cars to safety.
Now in Vinnytsia, Goltvenko tries to keep contact to people back home, but he said it’s getting harder as phone access fails.
One work colleague told him that he’d been able to leave Mariupol with his mom, but that his father had died, so he buried him near a bench in the garden of their apartment block. Now his only wish is to return to give his father a proper burial. Other colleagues told him a lawn in front of Azovstal’s office has been turned into an improvised graveyard where victims of the shelling are laid to rest.
On Wednesday, as he spoke, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that Russian forces had been violating cease-fires along the agreed humanitarian corridors, firing on buses, on residential areas and assembly points for evacuation.
The city council said that Russian forces had bombed Mariupol Drama Theater, the debris collapsing on top of the bomb shelter where perhaps more than 1,000 people were hiding. Their fate is unknown. Russia, which says it is only targeting military assets, dismissed the reported airstrike as disinformation.
Still, more than 30,000 people managed to leave Mariupol in recent days, headed for Zaporizhzhia, according to the city council.
“People calling me are actively asking for safe routes to leave,” Goltvenko said. “They didn’t lose hope, they want to survive.”
Image credits: Bloomberg, Azov Battalion via AP